Release your Inner Llama

By now I’ve got used to the Isle of Man College running ‘spiritual’adult education nightclasses with titles on the lines of ‘Release your Inner Llama’. It’s not as if Manx college tutors are actually capable of teaching adults anything these days anyway. In fact their current range of ‘vocational’ courses illustrates exactly how low government expectations of the current and future workforce are.

But as the college brochure was chucked through the door today I had a quick glimpse to see and giggle at what wacko delights were on offer. And as ever, tucked amongst flower arranging and ‘how to turn-a-computer-on’ type offerings was the now usual quasi-Buddhist emptyheadedness for bored rich thickos, plus a sprinkling of other new age psychobabble such as Reiki. A new departure was giving over to numerous, equally ill advised (not to say imbecilic), explorations of ‘Celtic Christianity’ the chapel that came with the premises for the now disgraced ‘business school’.Um… yes…. quite!

So far, so stupid. Far more serious is the involvement of Care for the Family, puppet of infamous christocentric UK hate group CARE, in a course on ‘Alcohol Awareness’ run by a governmental advisor on that very topic. I have little doubt they will also poke their homophobic noses into another course, theoretically on drug awareness. I also doubt if either course, even without CftF’s ‘help’, would stand up to critical analysis. After all, nothing else produced by the Chief Minister’s Task Farce on Alcohol and Drugs has.
That might be because the Christian fundamentalist careerists who first proposed the project to a previous Chief Minister would never allow anyone who might have an academic or professional background in such topics to get involved in the first place. Apart from anything else, an informed person with even a modicum of social responsibility would be obliged to tell politicians what a dumb idea it is to give public money intended to prevent drug and alcohol dependency to those who deal in nastier alternatives.  Alternatives which screw up families and make weak people socially and financially dependent on free-loaders for far more years than bargain basement vodka or heroin.

Who is helping who?

Last week when this (see http://www.gov.im/lib/news/cso/overseasaidcommi4.xml) appeared on the Manx government website I was sure we would read it in the columns of a ‘Manx’ newspaper in the next few days. Curiously, it has not appeared.

It certainly had all the right ingredients, i.e. a story involving a supposedly senior Westminster politician visiting a Manx government committee which purports to help poorer nations. The fact that Cox is actually a pariah even within Westminster Tory circles, and that Manx ‘overseas aid’ is far too often money gifted uncritically to neo-colonial dabblers (or  faith-based simpletons who only interfere in other countries because they are unemployable here) would not normally bother a docile local media which likes to be spoon-fed titbits from those whose advertising keep it going.

I remember our not-so-distinguished visitor as one of the main participants in a Rupert Murdoch funded campaign to curb local educational authorities in the early 1990’s. More particularly it sought to stop the better ones ignoring Section 28 – which prevented schools educating children about homosexuality (rather than presenting it as a disease or undesirable lifestyle). More recently she became involved in the Christian Institute, which even its politest critics view as the British evangelical right’s version of the Monster Raving Loony Party.

Further afield is her involvement in something known as the ‘One Jerusalem’ project, which seeks to deny Palestinian claims on the Temple Mount in favour of the current set-up, where a handful of the world’s most flat-earth Christian cults squabble amongst themselves over a square mile or so of mystic hoo-ha while the Israelis look on with gritted teeth and Muslim interests are handily ignored. Her overseas ‘charitable activities’ are similarly suspect, tending to perpetuate crude stereotypes of people from poorer countries which resist the ‘help’ (i.e. undemocratic control) of Western governments and evangelical charities as well as excusing some pretty inhuman UK government decisions, such as one where money is being, on the one hand, cut from women’s groups which genuinely help women escaping forced marriage and, on the other, given to a religious ‘charity’ to ‘help’ (i.e. repatriate back to their abusers) women allegedly ‘trafficked’ to the UK.

‘Trafficking’is one of those emotive terms played on by both evangelical panhandlers and racist civil servants.

We think we know of ‘thousands’ of poor foreign women smuggled into the West under false pretences by criminal gangs and then forced to work in the sex trade because we’ve read stories about them, not only in the gutter press but the women’s pages of supposedly liberal and objective papers. The problem is that when academics and serious journalists look closer they find that firstly all the stories were based on just two police raids, secondly the stories were coming from evangelical groups who saw that reviving Victorian myths about the ‘white slave trade’ could generate some handy government grants running ‘support groups’ and thirdly that neither figures nor sources could be substantiated. They were - to be absolutely blunt - plucked out of thin air, made up, bogus….(insert any term you prefer here).

In addition to the panhandling godbotherers, the other party to benefit is an immigration service which finds it easier to stereotype all women from certain countries who came here to work or have been held back by culturally conservative families as victims and tarts. This avoids awkward questions concerning their future employability and allows them to be forcibly returned on the next plane, under the supervision of Anglo-Saxon missionaries, while letting both sweatshop employers and misogynistic religious leaders with a power base in minority ethnic communities off the hook.

As knowing any of this involves research I doubt that it explains why the story was not used. Perhaps it was simply elbowed out by other ‘news’ beneficent to more immediate religious interest and privilege, though it would be interesting to know why Cox really came.

I suspect that a fellow evangelical on the far right of the picture might know the full story. If so, he will not be telling it.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

This herbert (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=45109 ) has been one of the oddest things happening over here this week.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No it’s…CROSSMA-A-AN!! Oh, and possibly compulsory workwear if the Christian Institute and Christian Legal Centre ever had their way.

Having first come across the story when a visibly bemused Paul Moulton had to interview him last weekend for Manxnet TV (see http://www.manx.net/tv/mt-tv/watch/5363/cross-the-nations ) - which we can be sure had absolutely nothing to do with several Manxnet staff and a key local advertiser being involved in a bizarre evangelical cult - I was beginning to wonder if it was all hype. Sure, he got coverage in all the local media, but nobody could recall seeing him - and a saddo dragging a 12 foot cross up Manx hills is the kind of thing one tends to notice.

The lunatic fringe of Manx Christianity getting extensive media coverage for something that never actually happened would be nothing new. If you need reasons for this, consider, for example, that the ‘national radio station’ has more ‘religious broadcasting’ than news-gathering staff (though only one godbotherer gets paid to my knowledge) and the news desk only works 8-4 weekdays, and that, since openly moving control, management and production off-island, the ‘national press’ is now interviewing their own staff as nobody else can (or wants to) talk to them.

But he was finally sighted in Ramsey yesterday. To be accurate, he was spotted ‘resting’ at the unused picnic area in the middle of the main street (thanks to the infamous ‘mural’, nobody eats there for fear of throwing up and trade at adjacent sandwich shops has been decimated), though nobody saw him actually walk in or out of the town.

If you were to believe one gushing press interview, he has been happily received by locals all around the island, getting stopped by passing Mercedes drivers, asked to pray for ailing relatives and other such rot. Even if a few lonely nutters did recognize a fellow headcase and ‘inter-acted’, his reception in Ramsey was not warm. To my certain knowledge he was asked only two questions by locals.

Firstly “Isn’t it time you got a job” and secondly “Why don’t you just carry a Kalashnikov? It would still make you look insecure about your manhood, but at least Kalashnikovs haven’t been responsible for as many innocent people dying as that thing.”

If you were wondering who on earth pays for such nonsense, it may help to know that, having started the week off with Onchan’s creationist lobby, he is due to end it at one of Ramsey’s one-man-and-a-dog evangelical outlets tomorrow. There were five at my last count and they do not even talk to each other. The truth is, at the rate they fall out and form new splinter cults there could well be six or seven by the morning, so it is impossible to say where ‘Crossman’ will be preaching, or if anyone will be there to hear him. 

Enough to drive you to drink

Judging from this (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/bill-set-to-tackle-antisocial-drinking-1-4499694 ) the Geriatric’s Choice is back to his old tricks. Possibly he’s just getting his token gesture out of the way before the winter, when most of those who elected him will either pop their clogs or develop full-blown Alzheimers and forget all about him.

An island-wide ban on public drinking? Guess that sort of nonsense is bound to be suggested eventually when you hand control of both social services and the police force to a bunch of Evangelical party-poopers.

The truth (as Singer would discover if he bothered to use the extensive government resources available to him) is that the police already have more than enough power to send anti-social drinkers on their way or lock them up.

It should also take less than 30 seconds (again, if he could be bothered) to discover that the current designated areas were carefully worked out between local authorities and police. In fact, when he was a Ramsey Commissioner he was (technically) present at those meetings. Even though they happened in closed sessions which are not minuted anywhere I had no problem finding that out, so unless he is now as senile as the care home duffers who voted him in he ought to recall it too.

With a little more research he could even discover that the binge-drinking problem does not exist outside the minds of a few terrified pensioners who never go out, the gutter press publications they read, and a tiny but determined lobby of religious parasites who see public money up for grabs with every folk devil and moral panic they can invent.

The Bill – as Singer also knows – will fail if more than half the House are awake or present when it is voted on.

But he’s still a prat, and this is still irritating.

Turning a crisis into a cash cow

This (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/jeremy-clarkson-loses-fight-over-langness-1-4490271 ) was sad news.

Stripped of legalese, what it means is that the daughter of the only Manxman ever to win a Victoria Cross cannot prevent rubbernecking ‘nature lovers’ pressing their noses up against her windows under the pretext of observing local wildlife. This is really a bad joke, considering such peeping toms are more of a freak of nature than any known wildlife, and get way more public subsidy than the endangered species that dwell in Sites of Specific Scientific Interest around Langness. Bit of a mystery how these freaks breed in the first place really, given that most seem to be of indeterminable gender or age (though all are startlingly bearded and/or otherwise hirsute) and with drab plumage which biologists would agree should repel rather than attract a mate.

As I have mentioned before, I once worked down the road from the cottages, and two workmates were sons of the last lighthouse-keeper, so I know the inside of the cottages, the footpaths and the Bennies (as we nicknamed them) who troll there quite well. So, I have no doubt that (a) there is no need for walkers to go so close to the window (b) the action of the Bennies is deliberately intrusive (c) many are so trapped in a deluded little bubble that they are mentally incapable of understanding that they have duties or that others have rights (in fact there are valid arguments as to why they should not be allowed in a public place without competent adult supervision) but (d) that any court or legal proceeding staffed by objective, capable professionals would be able to find a way through this which allowed decently minded nature lovers to wander around enjoying themselves without the Clarksons having to sit at home with drawn curtains all day. Sadly, the Manx legal system is the last refuge (outside politics and the civil service) of rich, self-serving thickos who would otherwise be begging in the streets, so common sense or justice were never options open to the Clarksons.

Which leaves them with a dilemma – what to do next?

If I was them I would consider turning the tables on the Bennies.

The thing is, when I first encountered examples of this species in the early 1980’s, it struck me I had not seen any offshoot of Homo Sapiens so odd since nursing patients stricken with GPI (General Paralysis of the Insane) in Devon back in the last decade of the Victorian asylums.

GPI was not, strictly speaking, a medical analysis. It was a polite term for the feeble-minded offspring of Plymouth prostitutes born in the days when that city was still a major military port, syphilis was rife and penicillin not widely available. As the poor creatures were inevitably institutionalized once diagnosed the last of them were dying out even as I worked there. Granted, rumour had it that 10p and a Mars bar still bought patients the favours their mothers once sold for slightly more, but in reality once confined to asylums for life they could not have children, and as anti-biotics and the downfall of Empire ended both the oldest profession and its side-effects outside asylum walls GPI ended too.

When you see horror films featuring old school mental hospitals, the wild-eyed stereotype of the patient in the straitjacket is the nearest you will see to the GPI sufferer. Needless to say, it has not been seen in a real mental hospital in decades. In the early 1990’s, while at college, I did a few night shifts at the last ‘old style’ Yorkshire asylum. Staff close to retirement vaguely recalled the name GPI, but no-one younger had seen a living example, which makes the Benny even more of an Object of Interest.

Who can account for it? More importantly, how much cash would you part with to see one?

So, instead of being trapped at home by slack-jawed yokels, why not turn Benny-watching into a business opportunity? If wealthy Brit tourists will pay a fortune to look at lions and tigers in Africa, they would surely shell out for a weekend break watching equally exotic wildlife closer to home? It would be far cheaper, far funnier and less dangerous. While getting the wrong side of a lion gets you half-eaten, the worst a Benny can do is drool on your sleeve – and if the glass between the two parties is thick enough, it need not even come to that.

Forget the heritage-themed loser scripts on which the Manx tourist industry has bet our future. Forget scraping the barrel to try and find even one viable example of Manx life in past times which would interest more than half a dozen anoraks on limited incomes.

We have a real life freak show to sell the world, the Clarksons may own the theatre and they should clean up, if only to get compensation for the injustice and blinkered attitudes they have to put up with from the Manx government.

Saving for the nation - or depriving it?

This attempt by Manx Nasty Heretics (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=44826 ) to grab a £1.2M legacy left to the community by a well meaning local made me laugh.

It is not just the pathetic attempt to pretend the general public will have a say. It is not even the way a hick judge can be trusted to pass somebody else’s entire life work over to the biggest drain on national and natural resources.

What made me laugh is remembering that some years ago I saw the will of a local collector who knows and despises this racket even more than I do. And, to be fair, he had good reason.

Three times, to my knowledge, their pettiness, ignorance and incestuous protection rackets deprived him or his family of an income, and in the process deprived the island of one of its most important historical buildings and the two finest monthly records of true cultural life it has ever had. As none of the national treasures in question actually passed to either Manx National Heritage or a competent party, all three are simply gone for ever.

Knowing this, and also knowing that the heritage mafia have ways of persuading people to hand over their property, with recourse to quite thuggish legal action if necessary, he set out to make an absolutely bullet-proof will. This ensures that when he finally pops his clogs the island’s least competent guardians of antiquities cannot get their grubby mitts on a substantial hoard of Manx archive material which has been freely offered to genuine researchers, but never has, and never will be, available to heavily government subsidised vandals who would probably flog it for a few crates of Special Brew (or whatever Manx culture-sepulchral throwbacks drink).

Some of the island’s finest legal minds (and there are not many) worked on a document which ensures that valuable treasures are only ever passed down to trustworthy genuine local historians and groups, and that before receiving them they sign binding legal documentation which ensures that should they ever work or accept assistance from MNH (or any individual who, in turn, does so) then the trustees seize back the goods and pass them on to a more deserving recipient.

As well as being legally watertight, it is also quite a funny and scathing document, and even the rumours of it set other local historians and collectors to thinking about similar action. In the process valuable, totally irreplaceable items of Manx cultural heritage (including books, audio tapes and film of the last Manx language speakers, artworks, original manuscripts by Victorian and Edwardian folk archivists and many other fine things) have been preserved for the Manx people, by ensuring that they can never – ever – pass to the government’s appointed trustees. In many cases the keepers of such treasures will never even let MNH or the Manx government know that they exist – at least until such time as the island is run by saner folk who would know what to do with them.

Unholy Smoker

It probably says something about contemporary Britain that I had to find one of the wittiest defences of old school English ‘live and let live’ values I have read in a while in the Daily Mail, not the Guardian, and only after a tip-off from an American libertarian website.

On reflection, it may not be surprising that I cannot read it in the Guardian. As recently as 2010, they would still print Hockney’s comments on such topics. These days there is more chance of finding them in the Methodist Recorder than Britain’s greyest neo-puritan newspaper, which seems to have reduced itself to a mouthpiece for sundry anoraks, wet blankets, drabs and curtain twitchers – even if they do live in Hampstead.

David Hockney comments: “I am sick of the constant negativity in Britain, the utter meanness of spirit (possibly not good for the health) that seems to have taken over everywhere.”

Coming from Hockney, this is interesting, because way back in the days when Beatlemania first hit the US Hockney moved there to further his career. His reasoning (at least as outlined by the film-maker Derek Jarman) was that in Wilson’s Britain – on the surface modern and meritocratic, under it as hopelessly class, race, gender and otherwise prejudiced as in Empire days - there was no place for a working class queer artist with a thick Bradford accent. It wasn’t just the weather that was cold and miserable; it was the thick, talentless elite who ran the gaff, and the majority population who let them.

Having settled back in Britain (oddly enough because, as he says, even Manhattan is now as conformist as the American Midwest talented artists used to go to Greenwich Village to escape), his latest gripe is the escalation of UK health nazi madness and the new rulings that make it all but impossible for stores to admit that they have cigarettes for sale, or to tell potential customers what brands they have.

While I am not (and never have been) a smoker, the rapidly snowballing efforts by bansturbators to stop grown-ups taking basic decisions over their lives and health are important to monitor. As close observers are noting, any junk science scare story or tactic used by superannuated puritans to stop smoking today will be (and already is being) used to restrict or illegalise other grown-up pleasures under the thin excuse of ‘protecting’ public health.

The campaigns, the ethics, the methodology and the arguments are stupid, anti-democratic, and highly offensive. So, just as much as hedonists with a small ‘h’ need to speak out against religious fanatics who want us to all to be miserable and compliant, we also need to speak out against the quasi-religious, pseudo-scientific and cod-moralistic quacks running the New Church of the Empty Head. Vinegar-titted miserablists who would deprive us of any small pleasure still to be found in the 21^st century madhouse.

As Hockney says elsewhere in the piece (see http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2129954/David-Hockneys-smoking-hot-memo-Andrew-Lansley-Keep-mean-dreary-views-life.html for more): “I say to the Health Secretary: we all die. It’s what you do in between birth and death that’s the concern of most people.”

He goes on to say: “I was told by an anti-smoking fanatic (and I know about them as my father was one, although my smoking elder brother has now lived longer than he did, as I will this year) that tobacco ‘killed’ one hundred million people in the 20th Century.

I pointed out one hundred million people were killed in the 20th Century for political reasons and their deaths were very unpleasant indeed. You cannot use a word such as ‘killed’ with smokers.”

Hockney complains: “The low-grade, low-intellect people now ruling us seem to have no vision at all.”

He concludes: “Mr Lansley, Mr Cameron, Mr Miliband, Mr Clegg: Keep out of my life. I don’t want your dreary view of life infecting me. It’s not good for my health, or others around me.”

Exactly the same story (be it on a smaller, duller parochial level) is unfolding on the Isle of Man. So, to those rumpled grey suits and minds that are the Manx versions of Cameron & Co, I would echo Hockney’s message.

Just look at yourselves in a mirror some time, you drab nonentities, then go away and die of the boredom you want to inflict on everyone else.

(hat tip to Lew Rockwell)